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Have a PhD in History; but am currently unemployed, and have been underemployed and unemployed since receiving that doctorate degree.
Have traveled around the world and have lived in various cities across the world, mostly in Europe and in the Americas. Served four years in the US military as a non-combattant.

Some social inventions have endowed humanity’s diversity for millennium. The public market was one such social invention, but modern capitalism exterminated that one.

The monopolies of print newspapers were definitely not one of them. Idolatry and innuendo of the printed word can only go so far, and thankfully, the Internet is destroying that media. European civilization did gift the world two good things however: the game of football, or soccer as we say in the States, and public drinking establishments.

Yet, I now despise bars. I used to enjoy visiting such alcoholic dens. But even when a few bars have had good tasting food to offer – I cannot do it anymore – nor can I afford it anymore. I have seen the light of Reason. But a more important question begs to order: what happened to public drinking establishments in the States? The American Revolution was partly started in urban taverns, and the Wild West lived inside of western saloons.

We must return to Roman civilization. The first bars were actually Tabernae, or taverns. These little stores and eating-drinking establishments had the complete bottom floor to the roads. The owners were often freedmen who got into the trade in order to supply urban dwellers and other visitors ready-made, cheap foods and cheap drinks.

There was not much mead, nor bier, or beer, in those Roman cities. Instead, the cauponis, or innkeepers, served vino, or wine, out of cool, large wooden casks, called cellae, with the most expensive regional grape representing Falernia. The first bars or taverns were more similar to the small convenience stores with large wine barrels, now called bodegas, currently found all over Spain.

Thanks to this popular Roman experiment in social class climbing and cheap oblations, the invention spread all over European civilization, from the steppes of the Rus, or Russia, to the hills of Hibernia, or Ireland, from the fjords of Norvege, or Norway, to the mountains of Iberia, or Spain. Europeans would never lose their shoddy reputations as the Kings of Binge Drinkers and ad-hoc partying. Roman Carnival just never ended for all of them: Bacchus, (Drink), Pan, (Music), and Priapus, (Sloppy Sex). In our absurd contemporary world, we can now add, football, or Soccer, into the sensual mix.

German culture had the kneipe, while French culture preferred the brasserie. The Spanish set up mesones. For the sake of this essay, I will not list every European name for a bar-drinking establishment, as the reader could surely find a specific name for such places in every European language, from Turkish to Breton, and from Frisian to Basque. The American version takes its lift from British culture.

Britain had its alehouses, which were private drinking establishments with a 24 hour, seven-day a week, lock ins. These places were in pre-Norman invasion Britain. At least one thing survived the Anglo-Norman shock troops.

It was during the late 13th century that the first public houses, or pubs, appeared, often run by tenants paying a fee for serving the brew master’s ales, or through freeholders, who owned the entire operation.

These public drinking establishments became such a rage that England’s greatest authors celebrated the local cultures that swam in such saloons, or particular entertainment rooms, filled with storytelling, songs, music and games. Chaucer’s setting for the Canterbury Tales took place at the roadside Tabard Inn, while the notorious Shakespearean character, Falstaff, was often found half-drunk, or pissed, at the Boar’s HeadInn.

Due to the hazards of road travels in those medieval days, many pubs were similar to travelers inns and taverns, which served special drinks and prepared foods. Some places had shared bed lodging, so the drinkers could snore and sleep off the hard water alcohol. The inns generally served beer and ale, while the taverns also served wines.

When the States was the colonial American Plantations, taverns became the premier social space for American men. In Boston, the historical legend states that the first plotters began their talks for American independence inside the Green Dragon Tavern.

As the United States moved west, the first saloons opened their doors for men, which were essentially taverns that served mainly whiskey, beer, sweet wine and other strange concoctions. These saloons also had gambling, such as tilted machines, dice draws, and card games. Other saloons attached themselves to bordellos of loose women, the so-called ‘opera house’ for cheap entertainment, or the local hotel.

Once the US Federal government ‘closed the western frontier’ and ended any ‘wild west’ freedom, about 100 years ago, the first state licensed bars emerged. The bars took their style from the original pub counters in Britain – without the saloon theatrics. Gun fights in the bars now led to arrests and imprisonment. The origins of bars were more medicinal, since certain sick people could take spirits in order to soothe their pains.

With the Woman’s Crusade of 1873, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Movement and the Anti-Saloon League gaining in political favor, the saloon-bar was a marked entity. The US Federal Government passed the Eighteenth amendment to the Constitution, and the drinking establishments ceased to exist – except for the illegal Speakeasies. This period was Prohibition.

After the repeal of Prohibition in the 1930s, the saloon transformed into a wild west side-show, and the bar took over everything, with taverns only designating food service with booze. Bars were also open to both men and women. The meat marketscene began with both young and old men trying to chat with, and hopefully lay, the women visitors.

In towns across America, each bar snatched a particular, cultural personality. There were the dive bars for the drunks and cheap losers, old men bars for the elderly drunks and cheap losers, cowboy bars, local bars, cop bars, gay-lesbian bars, black bars, (for the Blacks), vato bars, (for the Mexicans), driller bars, (for the oil and gas workers), and miner bars. With the success of professional sports in American life, and especially the NFL, during the 1970s, the sports bar emerged with multiple television sets on the walls.

In the Amerikan Empire, we now have themed bars, from Metal to Folk, and from Punk to ‘Decadent,’ or whatever that means. Bars have used every imaginable enticement in order to fleece more money from the customer-marks. They regularly employ happy hours, free crappy food days, lady’s nights, DJ-band cover charges, game nights, trivia nights and holiday bashes with expensive entrance tickets. The old demarcations between bars and private nightclubs have blurred.

The pool hall is falling into the relic of historical memory – while hopefully, the latest incarnation of the Amerikan bar will end up there too. Why would a Doctor Historian Anarchist wish for such a thing?

Walking into an American bar is like invading the private den of an enemy. Our current incarnations of bars have lost their community soul. Even the local bar in the small town is dying. Many of the people visiting such establishments represent the lumpen refuse of the Amerikan political-economic nightmare.

Most of the patrons have serious drinking problems, terrible physical maladies, or mental issues – or all the above together. The conversations are either one person monologues that display horrendous suffering, or they represent aggressive-paranoia, back and forth bantering. I have never been able to have an enlightening talk with another person inside those places. I have been able to converse with others inside weirdo cafes – while loaded with caffeine.

The consummation of heavy doses of alcohol with extreme global monopoly capitalism has murdered the bar vibe. This is the reason we should cut down the bar dependency: global monopoly capitalism.

Bars often have owners who personify the worst elements of the small business owner class. Some years ago, I remember visiting a bar run by so-called Anarcho-Syndicalists in a hipster west coast city, and I later found out that the employees did not even receive wages – only tips! And those guys were supposedly fighting the Class War in the employee’s name? There are hundreds of bars across the States where the owners don’t even pay their employees basic wages.

Due to the nastiness of the owners, the tipping scam is out of control in those rip off joints. At restaurants, Americans generally tip 20% for the final bill of service. But in bars, the bartenders expect at least a dollar tip for every drink served! Most bars now have drinks that at least cost five dollars or more, so a dollar plus per drink means 20% per order. If you decide to act the gentleman and pay for a few rounds, the customer is looking at a good amount of his or her salary falling into bartender tips. If you don’t follow this code, you might have the bartender slip some Visine eye wash into your next order – and straight to the restroom you will run.

Intelligent patrons know that using a bank-debit card in a bar is a dangerous proposition. In American bars, you must only use cash. When the bartender’s friends come in for a visit, which they regularly do, then guess who is paying for the ‘free drinks’?

When the bartenders are not dipping into the owner’s till for their lost wages – then the rest of the drinks are on you. If you forget your card and leave it overnight, then you might as well take a deep monetary hit.

Finally, both bar owners and bartenders are generally rude cretins. I have rarely encountered a gentleman-gentlewoman bartender or bar owner working inside an American drinking hole. I have encountered plenty of obnoxious and rude assholes – and they still expect you to tip them 20%!

How many actual bartenders know how to pour a beer, mix a cocktail or even serve properly a glass of wine? There are very few left. In our savage capitalist system, more and more low skilled, jack of all trades people now work behind the bar counter. They might dress well, have a tight friendship with the owner, and if they are attractive women, create a certain eye candy – but they are not true bartenders.

Our bars have even become part of the grand American Pyramid Scheme. We pay inflated prices on cheap drinks in order to feel happy for a very short period in our transient lives; meanwhile the bar owner and bartender openly detest us. They might say hello and do a little idle chatter with us, but their eyes always betray their hate and murder. We continue to flush our money down their till toilets.

We do have options. We could simply visit the local liquor store, convenience store or supermarket down the street. Buy paying less for more product, we might also have some money left over for food, like a delicious round of pizzas. We can enjoy the booze and food all within the good community of family and friends.

We ought to reject the fears of encountering bar owner-bartender scam artists, and the aggressive lowlifes who regular visit dive bars in order to commit violent acts. We don’t even have to worry about getting DUIs, where the police normally haunt bars in order to destroy people’s lives.

Submitting to a supposedly cool, fraudster-hipster hangout is just not worth the destruction of our honor, nor the loss of our basic human dignity, nor even playing slaughter house chicken with our fragile lives.

Human civilization has made its own history through the tempests of culture and creation.

But with all of civilization’s benefits, humanity simultaneously cursed itself to permanent warfare. Warfare does not just exist on the battlefields with armies and weapons; it also functions inside the unjust and unequal distributions of class power within both society and culture. The warfare of urbanization has represented one of the most absurd attributes, whirling inside the tragic saga of the human condition.

Humans have left the sanctity of the land, the hearth, and the family, in order to transform themselves into subjects under the weary gaze of the rulers. The subjects receive a new identity, and yet they become targets for both the rulers and the enemies of the rulers. Wherever there are political rulers, there are always enemies. A minute faction from the subject population reaches into the ruling clique, while another minute faction joins the enemy camp.

Some human ideas have been beneficial to civilization, such as fire for culinary, metallic-sculpture and martial arts, and the wheel for transport, industry and the ceramic arts.

The human invention of urbanization helped deliver civilization to Homo sapiens sapiens. The urban subject no longer had the obligation to work inside the Earth and hunt for food. They could attend to their own private gardens and enjoy the bounty of culture found in the city.

But there was also a terrible price on their heads, and a nasty fear had piqued those very subjects. What if the rulers became tyrants and then decided to sacrifice their own subjects in order to hold on to their own power? What if the enemies of the rulers surrounded, starved out and sacked the city, enslaving everything away in chains – including the subjects private belongings, and even destroying completely people’s extended families?

One of Urbanism’s stage right onto human history represented the 6 century BCE. On the Gulf Coast of Mexico lived a great people, referred to later in history, as the people of the rubber, or the ‘Olmecs.’

The land was good. The warm, balmy climate offered an agricultural abundance, yet its tempests disciplined the cities. The winds could bite, and yet they spread their ethereal honey on the plants and maize. The rains sometimes drenched and drowned the unwary travelers. Plants still made love to the rain. The reeds were often harsh to touch, but they helped in maintaining the delicate balance. Everything drank from the earth’s sacred blood, and then it all cascaded deep into the rain’s sacred liquid pools.

In the Olmec world, an impressive city of stone had stood proud to the world, and it possessed a marvelous large pyramid of brown boulder rocks in the center. Around the pyramid were bulky grey temple structures and some thick quarry palaces for the ruler’s family, noble relations, and priests. The massive stone pyramid holding the dark glare, gave the subjects a sense of identity, and it seemed that the calendar rituals and religious festivals truly connected to the earth world at both the cave level and sky worlds.

Sacrificial bloodletting enabled the elites to perform the magic effortlessly. All subjects possessed their blood lines to the city’s elites, whether through artisan, merchant or farmer relations. Their blood ties also ran deep into three distinct categories: territory, family and service-labor obligations.

Everybody had their own economic niche and knew their place within the city. There were no vagabonds or beggars, and no one starved on the streets. There weren’t any issues with festering garbage refuse, nor with rampant disease. The city was actually quite small compared to modern standards. It only had a few thousand residents. But each resident existed as part of a grander family, and an even larger kinship group. Everyone recognized his or her own sacred hearth and home within the great urban polity. The Olmecs were living in an almost paradise.

Yet, the urban polity felt unsettled about the constant warfare, the enemies that led sudden attacks, or even the unknown wrath of natural disasters, such as storms, quakes and floods. Like all things in the cosmos, the times began to change, with war and disaster occurring more frequently and more devastatingly. What was actually changing, if the same rituals of sacrifice and devotions had always stayed the same?

The elite families could change the rules for obligatory labor services and tribute taxes. With the continual wars, they often did demand more from the subjects. Living in a great city was a divine gift, but at the same time, the subject lived in dread of the elites’ magical and violent powers. What if the wars led directly to them? What if the city had actually defeated the enemies, yet the enemies had already destroyed all the family and kin ties?

Better to live free and easy than under the tutelage of a powerful, military dynasty – even with all of the blood ties. The subjects slowly began to leave the cities. They preferred to farm out in the mountains, near the water sources, runs, and forest clearings. Eventually, more people began to leave the city for the basic freedom found in the abundant Earth. About two hundred and fifty years later, after so many more years of warfare and emigration, the magical and powerful city stood abandoned.

The ancient city had its days in the light of civilization, and even the ancient Olmec elites knew that their cities would die in the distant future – just like the old dynasties and the old, decrepit great grandfathers.

Our modern cities are vastly different however. These blights on humanity refuse to die and the political-economic elites that run such cities have used every conceivable criminal trick within the shadowy schemas of history to continue their misrule. Our modern monsters want their hells to live forever in order to burn and flay the ignorant and poor masses. And like always, they seem to get away with their horrifying games of corruption.

Our modern cities have become suffocating nightmares representing the perversions of global monopoly capitalism strangled with rampant state consolidation, street level criminality, institutional corruption, and city hall tyranny. Meanwhile, the urban subjects have to shame themselves continuously in watching the slow dying of the homeless, while enduring the public signs that threaten fines and imprisonment with those public, intrusive billboards that advertise useless crap.

Within the chasm of modern urbanism, most of us must deal with street hustling and the brutality of open poverty. Most terribly, the rulers constantly threaten their own citizens in demanding regular payments for all of this madness. The subjects must submit to unending and augmenting protection monies through rent paying, housing frauds, bad public transit, utility extortions, municipal and sales taxes, street fines, parking fees and wage slavery.

Meanwhile, the urban masses endure the miseries of contaminated dirt, household pests, rude behaviors, flim flam artists, common insults and reckless property pimping. The three wild animals that tend to survive in these environments are rats, cockroaches and pigeons. That our modern, urban populations do not end up as crazed lunatics on the streets, explains the marvelous surviving power of the human will under civilization.

Some crap historians have stated that this urban system of decay has always existed within human civilization. This is another abject and hideous lie. The Greek polis had only few thousand actual citizens. Ancient citizens fully participated in the life of the polis, whether at war, peace, festivals or simply speaking truth to power in the public markets and plazas. No citizen had to live a marginalized existence. Those cities were more like medieval monasteries without all the rules, controls, living in cells, and hiding away from the public. The Greek polis lived as a tight community of citizen-warriors-pleaders engaged in the full plenary of an urban, spiritual life.

The imperial Roman city had changed greatly since the days of Peloponnesian Wars in the Hellenic peninsula, (during the fifth century BCE), but the spirit of the polis still survived – and even as ancient imperial Rome, (around the second century AD), had reached a population level of few hundred thousand.

Urban Romans generally lived in two types of housing, either in the ‘domus,’ or a type of round-square urban house with a garden and front patio, or in ‘insulae,’ which were small apartments in block buildings. These homes had no glass windows and anyone could enter the domus patios and the insulae apartments. The Romans had little need for privacy because the Roman state did not imprison and murder their own citizens over personal conduct. People lived in the public realm because the honor of the community was more important for social cohesion.

The insulae dwellers did not pay our contemporary rent extortions as some historians have stated; instead, the residents of the insulae paid for their housing through labor or service obligations, within the personal political economy where the lesser clients worked for their wealthier patrons. Roman insulae dwellers received a regular dole of bread and some other foodstuffs for basic survival. No Roman complained about such a dole because an urban resident received the basic rights for survival and community support.

All Roman citizens could take part in the political and public life of the market, or the ‘forum.’ Citizens had the right to use the public baths and bathrooms of the cities, called, ‘latrinae.’ All citizens gathered their drinking water, cleaning water and community news at the public fountains. Roman public life also frequented the market stalls where each city street had a particular artisan craft on display, called ‘tabernae.’

Roman elites also built their far off cities, called ‘colonae,’ for a specific population size, and all urban citizens, whether soldier or artisan, possessed full inclusion within the greater urban life. Romanization was not just an arrogant Caesar conquering a territory, it also represented an inclusive, small city for all nations that desiring to live the Roman, urban, imperial dream.

How did our modern cities become the horrors of horrors that they are today? We can thank European imperialism and mercantile capitalism, with their invasions, prisons, epidemics, colonialism, slavery and mass murder, around the middle of the sixteenth-century, or the 1500s.

European Colonialism destroyed the ancient cities and the marvelous wonders around the world. It replaced them with the health horrors that still fester in our days. The European colonial invaders who hated washing and cleanliness wanted to infect the rest of the world with their own miseries. In that sense, they were successful.

The European colonial powers enforced mercantile capitalism through its brutal monopolies, massive land thefts, slave trading and export plantations that worked the kidnapped laborers to death. Mass kidnapping rings located off the coasts of West Africa could always replenish the exterminated labor pool.

European colonial statecraft set up the first prisons, Inquisitions, witch hunting tribunals, and other wondrous torture methods to scare the cowardly. European authorities imposed the first forced conversions in order to exterminate the native cultures. The European colonial city had thus transformed into cauldrons of sickness, disease and the bad death. And like all epidemics, they have spread out into the entire human world.

The European colonial elites further perverted modern urbanism through dividing the colonial city into racial caste and social class sections. There was one destitute section for the colonized victims and the other poor losers, where there was another nicer section, usually around the city center, for the colonial bureaucrats and military commanders, inclusive of wealthy slave traders and slave owners who owned their second homes.

We still see such eyesores today. We have our ghettos ransacked with no jobs or brutal jobs that pay badly, abandoned buildings, disease and rodent infestations, run down, street crime ridden sections of town, and next we have our gentrified, hipster zones where the easy job, six figure salary people enjoy clean, well-stocked supermarkets with eclectic cafe-bar-restaurants. The city’s government juntas don’t care about how many people move into their urban wastelands, which chew out their millions of victims. The more poor vermin that enter, the greater the slave wage, reserve army of labor population pool. These massive, megalopolis cities literally feed from the trough of criminal neglect.

Large cities that are also capital cities are even worse off than the megalopolis cities. A large population of the capital city essentially exists on state parasitism. These state spongers include paper pushing government bureaucrats, military, judicial, legislative managers, political executives, numerous guard-security-police forces, and other useless appendages, such as media hacks, corporate consultants and ideological front groups. They offer no useful skills to society whatsoever – except in maintaining the supremacy of central, state and municipal government power.

There is no hope in changing such blights on humanity and on the Earth. The smart losers become wiseguys, gangsters and street thugs, while the sad others have to either beg for the privilege of becoming a wage-rent paying slave, or the real unfortunates, sensitive others, just abandon all hope and wait to die horribly on the city streets. Suicide through urban neglect.

Many fall into the traps and permanent craters of modern, urban life. Some will die painfully from mental-physical illness, or they will become hopeless addicts partying on bad, cheap drugs. Some others just spend the rest of their days in the prison-gulag-concentration camp system. A few will make it as low-level, legal assassins for the state’s military institution. Eventually, poverty, war and misery will tear apart most of their fragile minds and bodies.

Living within our modern urban pits, the political-economic elites have continued their relentless war against us. We Anarchists know this truth and so we only have one option remaining: we must fight against such injustices through both our dignity and honor.

We can squat abandoned buildings. We could wheat paper and spray paint over their threatening signs, or we can set up spontaneous parties in the city streets. We might also set up free kitchens, guerrilla gardens, and feedings, or arrange a free, bartering market in a public park – or even occupy central city locations and make them our own domains.

We have only our personal wills to mental freedom – these gifts still remain with us.